A report released by the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO) Tuesday credited historically Black colleges and universities with a disproportionately large share of Black educational gains over the past two decades.
Coinciding with the 2008 National HBCU Week Conference in Washington, the NAFEO report, “The State of Blacks in Higher Education,” revealed that HBCUs “awarded nearly 50 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to Blacks in the natural and physical sciences, a little more than 25 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in engineering, and nearly 25 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to Blacks.”
“This is an outstanding achievement given that HBCUs are only 3.3 percent of all the institutions,” the report notes.
“It will be an annual report that we will put out each year. What I think the data show is that although Black colleges tend to be woefully and disproportionately underrepresented in terms of public dollars … with the dollars that are invested in HBCUs, we’re having significantly greater output,” says Dr. Leslie Baskerville, NAFEO president.
Baskerville adds the report points out that HBCU “engineering programs were making progress; that directly aligns with the fact that we got federal dollars earmarked for HBCU science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs.”
